To overcome the existing limitation on the specification of servers, the present related industry spares no efforts to reduce the area for installing each of the required components of the server, and greatly increases the number of installable disk drives, and thus maximizing the performance of the server.
The inventor of the present invention also filed an application and was granted with the U.S. Patent Publication NO. 2003-0112596A1 entitled “Server with four hard disk drives”. The invention disclosed an 1 U 19-inch server specification capable of installing four standard 3.5-inch hard disk drives. The inventor of the present invention also filed the U.S. Patent Publication No. 2003-0147210A1 entitled “Server chassis with control panel” that can change the position of the control panel to expand the number of installable disks. However, the computation speed of a computer in actual practice is increasing day after day and thus only 9˜12 disks are no longer sufficient for the practical application. The method of maximizing the number of installable disk drives under the condition of unable to further expand the server while complying with the existing server specification demands immediate attention and improvement.
After a 2.5-inch hard disk drive of a smaller volume specification having the performance of a 3.5-inch hard disk drive of a larger volume specification is introduced, the foregoing problem is solved. For example, the traditional disk array 1′ as shown in FIG. 1 can install 16 sets (4×4) of the 3.5-inch hard disk drives, but it can install 30 sets (6×5) of 2.5-inch hard disk drives in the same space as shown in FIG. 4. The new specification can greatly improve the storage capacity of the disk array 1′. However, it is found that if the circuit board 20′ used for the traditional disk array 1′ is adopted, then the number of connection ports 205′ on the circuit board has to be increased accordingly because the number of hard disk drives 10′ is increased. Therefore, there remains no more space on the circuit board 20′ for the layout of the circuitry, and thus it is a major factor that the 2.5-inch hard disk cannot be used for the disk array 1′ in the present industry.